Wedding Jewelry, Labels and Guestbook

Graphic Design

I spent a fair amount of time doing graphical ideation to explore various concepts relating to mountains and incorporating other elements like hearts, forests and our initials. My main goal was to create something fairly simple that would scale well to the size of an earring. I filled up several pages with little doodle and sketches.

I narrowed it down to a handful of my favorites and sketched them up in Fusion 360. This made it easier to enforce constraints and actual dimensions (compared to Inkscape).

I selected my favorite, tweaked the final positioning and exported a .dxf of the sketch. I then imported the sketch into Inkscape to setup and adjust the various paths for the laser cutter.

Bling

Materials

I first experimented with engraving and cutting on the standard birch plywood.

My partner had a similar set of earrings made from bamboo, but I wasn’t able to locate any locally without sourcing an entire 4 ft x 8 ft sheet. As a workaround, I purchased a bamboo stirring spoon from a Dollar Store and used the thickness sander to get it to the thickness I wanted. The earrings cut well and I liked the durability and absence of any requirement for finishing.

Since we were having a fall wedding and incorporating maple leaves, I thought it would be great to make the pieces out of maple instead. I sourced some maple stock and used the table saw to slice it into thin strips, then again used the thickness sander to fine-tune the thickness.

Finishing

I sealed the earring with clear acrylic after some sanding, then mounted them to the jewelry findings.

Wine Labels

The next task was to make up some wine labels. I sent my friend a rough sketch to get some fresh insight.
concept

She sent back a bunch of awesome concepts, including these:

I took the original artwork developed for the jewelry and started incorporating the style. During the process, I figured out a reasonable workflow for generating the necessary paths for both the lines and the regions for a low-polygon style.

After adding some text and printing - Wine labels:

Guest Book

This was a result of last minute panic strategic procrastination (it’s a thing). We wanted to do a unique guestbook, but hadn’t been able to decide on what. Leveraging the time I’d already invested into the design seemed like a win-win.

I enlarged the design to fit properly inside an IKEA photo frame and adjusted some of the stroke widths before creating the necessary tool paths for laser cutting.

Keeping track of all the pieces was a challenge and we had the opportunity to ‘solve’ the puzzle more than a few times.

I recruited my sister-in-law to help paint the pieces. She has some serious skill and far exceeded my expectations by accurately color matching the paint to the colors used in the logo.

Guests were able to sign their names to the pieces and include a message on some of the larger pieces. The initial idea was to have the pieces out of the frame and let people find the right spot after signing them. After the 4th or 5th attempt trying to get the pieces back in the right place, it was decided to just secure them in place with some tape on the back and let them be signed in place.

Pretty happy with how everything turned out.

7 Likes

Awesome art!
And Congratulations on your wedding!

that guest book idea is really genius. Glad it turned out well.

1 Like

Wow, that all looks amazing Jake! Congratulations on the wedding. The wine
label idea is great, I wish I could borrow it…, we also had a laser
cutter-aided wedding (with a mountain theme no less).

It all looks amazing!!

-Bob

Awesome work, Jake! Time to break out the extra large soldering iron, as your design has what it takes to become a great (and very real) stained glass window.

3 Likes

Really impressive stuff Jake, making your wedding really personal. Tip of the hat bud.

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